Disqus - Friends of salim

Re: Social search, not authority-based (Scripting News)

evansolomon — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 21:58:57 -0000

It no doubt makes it harder, but the lack of "firehose" wouldn't totally rule out the possibility of building this search enhancement, at least the way Loic suggests. Follower count is accessed the users/show request in Twitter's API, an unauthenticated API call, meaning that it's not rate limited. Call's to Twitter's search API are also not rate limited (or at least not strictly, they say they'll turn off access for abuse). So using Loic's suggestion of follower count as the rank, you could build an authority-based search on top of Twitter Search without having access to the full data feed.

Using the "who I follow" method gets a little tougher because then you have to use an authenticated (rate limited) API call.

Re: RSS as the foundation for realtime (Scripting News)

evansolomon — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:38:59 -0000

If you want a legit competitor to Feedburner, it's worth pointing out that advertising is probably at least as important, if not more, than RSS stats in attracting users. If what you actually want--and this is what it sounds like--is an open source app to compile server logs or something like that into a nice stats UI, that's a much different endeavor than a Feedburner competitor imo.

Re: RSS as the foundation for realtime (Scripting News)

evansolomon — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:47:57 -0000

I like the "ad on an ad" line, it's clever. However, I don't think it's accurate here. I can understand your comparison of a feed to an ad (if that's in fact what you were doing) but it's pretty obviously content that can be advertised against.

To keep the "ad on an ad" thing going, I bet a TON of companies would pay to crossbrand really successful commercial campaigns (like the Budweiser frogs from years back)--probably not as many would pay to crossbrand the HeadOn disaster commercials. Ads and content can merge, and to the extent that a feed is like an ad, I think that's a clear example of it.

Re: Rethinking authentication (Scripting News)

evansolomon — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:16:59 -0000

Dave, can you please refute #2? I think there are several holes in this plan, but this is the most important one.

I also think the idea that OAuth is too complicated for developers who are already writing user-accessible, security permissioned applications using an API is stretching reality. On the user side, I don't think it's particularly complicated, but I may be missing something there.

Re: Rethinking authentication (Scripting News)

evansolomon — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:37:19 -0000

There's a big difference though. Access via OAuth is tiered--validating account credentials with a token is not the same as having the username and password. That's an important distinction.

Re: How to fix the 10 worst things about Microsoft Outlook

evansolomon — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:34:59 -0000

Hi Preston, I work with Xobni and wanted to say thanks for the great mention here.

It looks like you're running an outdated version of Xobni. You should get upgraded automatically, or you can download the newest version from http://xobni.com/download

Some of the additions address the top panel and bring valuable data from the Web through integrations with Facebook, LinkedIn and Hoovers. Using the email sender's name and address Xobni can pull in items like job title and employer from LinkedIn, status and profile photos from Facbook and company data from Hoovers.

Xobni can also search your Yahoo! Mail inside of Outlook for free (no need to buy Yahoo! Mail Plus) without downloading that mail onto your local machine.

Re: Confessions Of A Pack Rat (aka My Document Retention Policy)

evansolomon — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:17:27 -0000

Why anyone would delete an email that could ever, under even the most extreme circumstances, be valuable, is beyond me. In a time when storage is virtually free and there's any number of ways to archive/index stuff, I can't even understand an opposition to what you're describing.

Re: Thank you Google! Thank you! Thank you!

evansolomon — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:41:44 -0000

Really enjoyed this post Jamie. I kind of wish you had talked more about the carrier aspect of these services, because I think that can actually act as a really nice insurance policy for PhoneTag. Google has a lot of incentive to try to beat and/or be the next carrier, and in doing so they obviously take a lot of downside risk. Carriers, as horrible as they are as partners based on talking to lots of mobile companies, seem far more likely to try to work with PhoneTag than Google. This is obviously just (mostly uneducated) conjecture, but I'd be interested in what you have to say.

Re: How to get started with Facebook's new API? (Scripting News)

evansolomon — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:06:25 -0000

As convenient as it would be for lots of people (including myself) to have Facebook's API mirror Twitter's, it is an extremely tough thing to do. Facebook's API is WAY more complicated (and powerful) than Twitter's.

More importantly, Facebook has probably 20-40x as many users as Twitter. I have no idea how many developers either platform has, but I would guess that far more developer hours have been spent on Facebook's API than Twitter's. If that's the case, Facebook would almost certainly be doing themselves a disservice by jumping through hoops to make their API follow Twitter's.

Re: How to get started with Facebook's new API? (Scripting News)

evansolomon — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:24:09 -0000

Couldn't you make the exact opposite case for way more failed companies? Were A&P and Safeway shortsighted for not copying Webvan? Petco for not copying pets.com?

Obviously these are two of the most catastrophic web failures ever, but certainly not every up and coming company holds the secret to taking down the big guys.

The Microsoft/internet point is a fair one. And I'm not as familiar with the RSS saga as you, but I'm willing to believe you're more or less correct there as well. Those have got to be the exceptions rather than the rules though. Even if Twitter is really the next BIG thing, I don't think it's at all clear that Facebook won't be as well, or that there's any more velocity to the (admittedly) non-static developer population of Twitter than Facebook.

Re: I’ve been acquired, quiet period over

evansolomon — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:22:18 -0000

Thanks Salim, appreciate it. I have a ton of stuff I want to try already, and I'm sure we'll think of more once I actually start officially. Will do my best to share what I can here and on Twitter.

Re: Thinking about simple inbox hacks

evansolomon — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:53:47 -0000

Don't mess with creating new accounts for everything. Filter it all in your mail gmail account (tag and archive it). From that point if you want to forward it somewhere else it's easy. But don't create different email accounts for everything, just makes more things to forget and more signing in/out/in to control things.

Re: Enough with shortened URLs (Scripting News)

evansolomon — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:27:13 -0000

Can you provide a little more context for this? I did some searching and haven't come up with a reason for a change of opinion re: bit.ly. Thanks

Re: Anil Dash, tear down that wall. (Scripting News)

evansolomon — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 01:59:25 -0000

Do you really think that he cannot keep his career on track without deleting his Twitter account? That is a weighty idea, for Twitter as well as for Anil.

Re: Ustream to Bring Live Video to iPad

evansolomon — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:43:42 -0000

Justin.tv's existing iPhone app has a higher quality video stream for iPad users built in. Any iPad user will get video at twice the bitrate iPhone users receive so that when it's expanded it will fill the screen at the same quality you'd expect.

This is already available through our existing app.

Re: Evan Talking Jobs

evansolomon — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:10:48 -0000

Just found this post looking through my referrer stats. Awesome.

I don't really have a good answer for the "how," other than thinking about it the same way we approach "job getting" skills. Experience in internships and things like that helps for sure, but probably isn't a very scalable method. Maybe just more time interacting with people who have the kinds of jobs you think you might want.

Re: Creating a WordPress plugin - Blog - Austin Pickett - Freelance Web Developer

evansolomon — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:40:20 -0000

Nice post. Here are a few tips to consider

* You don't need to explicitly pass $this by refrence, PHP 5 will (basically) do that for you (more on that here if you're curious).
* Using PHP short tags (e.g. <?= ...) is handly but might cause unintended problems. That syntax is not globally supported below PHP 5.4, and WordPress is running in many environments where the short tags will not work correctly. It's safer, from a portability view, to use <?php echo ...
* There are a few places where you direclty print potentially dangerous data. You should sanitize it before printing it. For example value="<?=get_option('upload_image') ?>" should be <?= esc_attr( get_option( 'upload_image' ) ); ?>" to make sure you aren't vulnerable to XSS attacks, since you can't be 100% sure the data in the database is safe.
* Before checking what a $_POST variable equals, make sure it exists. If $_POST['fb_thumb_hidden'] isn't set, this will generate a PHP notice: $_POST['fb_thumb_hidden'] == 'Y'
* Generally you should be sanitizing translated data before you print it, esc_html_e( 'Options saved.' ) is safer than _e( 'Options saved.' )
* PHP files are safer without closing tags (the ?> at the end) because if you ever accidentally slip any whitespace in after the tag you could force the server to send headers early and break all kinds of things, like setting cookies.
* You don't need to explicitly bind your jQuery callback to $(document).ready( ... ), that is the default. Instead you can pass your callback straight to jQuery and get the exact same effect: $(function(){ /* function code is here */ });
* Instead setting the global $ JavaScript variable to jQuery, you can get the same benefit by passing jQuery to your function and locally defining $, which limits the risk you'll break any other code that doesn't expect $ to be jQuery: jQuery(function($){ /* function code is here */ });
* Instead of calling wp_register_script() and wp_enqueue_script() back to back, you can just pass all of the register arguments to the enqueue function. It will register it for you.